ESTONIAN LANGUAGE

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SOME FACTS

The Estonian language (eesti keel) is spoken by about 1.1 million people, of which the great majority live in the Republic of Estonia.

Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. Estonian is not related to its southern neighbor Latvian, which is a Baltic language related to Lithuanian. Estonian is related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and more distantly to Hungarian. One of the distinctive features of Estonian is that it has what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that IPA /toto/, /to:to/ and /to::to/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /tot:o/, and /tot::o/. The distinction between long and overlong is, in practice, as much a matter of syllable stress (involving pitch) as duration. Long and overlong vowels are not distinguished in written Estonian; plosives, however, appear in writing with three "degrees": b,d,g; p,t,k and pp;tt;kk (all unvoiced plosives).

Apart from the very clear links to the Finnish language, Estonian retains many Low German loan words that can be identified in English. For example:

Estonian "nurk" (corner) & English "nook", Estonian "koer" (dog) & English "cur", Estonian "tutar" (daughter) & German "Tochter"

Often English "b" is replace with a "p" in Estonian: Estonian "poiss" English "boy", Estonian "pikk" (long) English "big", Estonian "pargipink" English "park bench",

Often an initial "s" is dropped from the Germanic origin: Estonian "tool" (chair) from English "stool", Estonian "kool" from English "school", Estonina "tukk" from German "Stuck"